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I really, really like Android. A lot. I've been an Android guy since well before
I got an Android phone. It just always lined up more with the way I thought an
OS should work. I was always hopeful for WebOS, but it never felt quite finished
to me, and HP bought it only to kill it a year later. In addition to my
preference of the way Android works at a theoretical level, I'm also a heavy
Google apps user, and that's kept me on Android as a primary platform.

I've felt, however, that I've never given iOS a fair, honest shake as a primary
device. After a month with an iPhone 5 as a second phone (the first 2 weeks I
used it as my primary), I can say that this is absolutely true; as a gadget nerd
I really aught to have given it more of an effort. There's frankly a lot on the
platform to love. And also plenty to hate.

Hardware

I was quite happy with the hardware of the Nexus 4—a solidly built,
attractive device with a great screen and fast internals. It's completely
destroyed by the iPhone 5 here. The screen, in particular, on the iPhone 5 is
only about 10% better, but it's a huge 10%. The two areas where it's simply
better is color calibration and uniformity of brightness. The latter is a bit
harder to pull off on a larger phone, but there's no excuse whatsoever for the
former. Using the iPhone 5 has made me so unhappy with my Nexus 4 that I'm
planning on installing a custom kernel this weekend that allows me to adjust the
color. Like, seriously, this could have been fixed in software!

The build quality is just brilliant, and because of the nerrowness of the phone,
it fits in the hand far better. I'm not a fan of using the phone naked; though
it's beautiful, the sharp edges dig into my hand a bit. It's also delightfully
thin and light.

The battery life is a hair better in my use than the Nexus 4. I initially had
some issues with it, but I tracked down an app that was grabbing location data
continuously, and that was making the phone's daily lifespan into a useless
range.

Though the hardware difference that makes my Nexus 4 the most jealous is the LTE
radio. I'm on T-Mobile, and they've been rolling out their LTE network in NYC
and the surrounding areas lately. The LTE download speeds haven't been that much
faster than HSPA+ (the best I've found is around 25 Mbps, and I've found
comparable HSPA+ speeds in those locations), but the real difference is the
upload speeds and latency. All of my network operations feel much faster. In my
town in Jersey, some of the spots where T-Mobile had spotty coverage and would
previously drop down to Edge, I'm getting a decent LTE signal.

One little thing I now desperately desire on my Nexus 4 is the mute switch. It's
so damn useful. I know Android has great software toggles for this sort of
thing, but the additional affordances of having a hardware switch that can make
my phone instantly meeting/church/theater friendly is fantastic. It's such a
little thing that's really great. I never used the switch on the iPad, but I
don't take an iPad everywhere with me.

The screen size is a bit small, particularly for web browsing and reading. I'm
used to the monster 4.7" Android devices now, and the iPhone feels... cramped. I
don't know how I'd survive with the smaller screen of all the previous iPhones.
This isn't a dealbreaker for me at all, but I do prefer a larger screen.

The new "Lightning" connector is interesting. Apple changed the connector from
the 11-year-old proprietary connector dating back to the original iPod to
something that's maddeningly not micro-USB, which is the standard that
every single phone manufacturer other than Apple uses. However, Lightning is the
nicest interconnect I've ever used. The best part: it doesn't matter if you plug
it in upside-down. That's freaking brilliant. It just snaps in very solidly.
Every night before bed, I plug in my iPhone 5, and then fumble for 5 minutes in
the dark trying to plug in my Nexus 4. I really can't wait for one of the
wireless charging standards to become ubiquitous, so they can get cheap and
we can use them everywhere, but until then, we're stuck with this situation.

Software

Though the hardware is really great, and beats the vast majority of Android
phones neatly, the software is the more interesting difference. iOS is
fundamentally and philosophically different than Android in its goals, and thus
the surface-level similarities are really cosmetic. The preference for one or
the other is polarizing. The real reason I wanted to use this as a primary phone
for at least a couple weeks without jailbreaking (which I still haven't done at
the time of writing) was to see for myself if my preference for Android was
genuine, and not based on a superficial knowledge of what it is to own an iOS
device.

The good stuff first - the OS is really, really polished. The median perfomance
of the Nexus 4 is on just as responsive as iOS on the Nexus 4, but the outlying
cases is where iOS shines. It never, ever seems to drop below 60 FPS, no matter
what it's doing. That's phenomenal. Even though on the Nexus 4, I get 60 FPS
99.9% of the time, that additional 0.1% of time is really key to making the
platform feel more solid and real. And I'm not one to talk about "magic" with
software; I've done everything from basic web apps to debugging a SCSI tape
IOCTL in the Linux kernel. It's all comprehensible to me, but the consistent,
uniform performance is the closest thing to "magic" I've seen in years. It's
simply quite amazing.

And, frankly, shame on Google for not having this fixed yet. Android is way, way
smoother and faster than it was a few years ago, but it's still not good enough.
I don't want to hear damn excuses about garbage collection or or the extra
safety of bounds-checking in Dalvik or other nonsense. If you can't have your
render thread deliver a consistent framerate for 2D compositing on first-party
apps on a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro, that's kinda sad in 2013. I mean, you've
got more compute than a high-end desktop chip from like 5 years ago.

The polish of the OS also extends to the better iOS apps. Apple has been doing,
more consistently and for longer, a better job at teaching developers to make
apps that feel cohesive to the platform. Google put in a major new effort with
Ice Cream Sandwich 18 months ago, and that's helped an awful lot, but they still
haven't caught up. Tweetbot is just better enough than Tweetlanes to make me
prefer it. Prompt blows ConnectBot out of the water. The iOS versions of Vine,
Evernote, 1Password, etc. are better than their Android versions. And, frankly,
this is the key reason some geeky power users, who I'd expect to prefer
something super-customizable like Android, legitimately prefer iOS. It's nice to
be able to drink from this well.

But certain classes of apps are more functional on Android: notably ones that
sync large amounts of data in the background. Because of the limits of what iOS
apps are allowed to do in the background, particularly when push notifications
are recieved, they are made to feel slow and janky compared to their Android
equivalents. This primarily effects RSS readers, mail clients, podcatchers, and
similar apps. The lifecycle goes like this:

Recieve push notification for, say, a new email recieved

Tap on said notification to launch the app

Wait for app to load

Wait for app to sync with server and download new emails

Tap on email to view.Whereas with Android, when the push is recieved
from the server, the app is woken up, and immediately begins downloading
the new content before the notification is presented to the server. That
way, when the user taps on the notification, it brings them immediately to
the appropriate email message or whatever. I know iOS 7 will likely mitigate
some of this issue, but it doesn't do so for me right now.

This is exacerbated further in applications that want to sync a large quantity
of data, like podcatchers. An app can only run in the background for 10 minutes
at a time, so when you're syncing podcasts, which can be hundreds of megabytes
each, you have to do it more or less manually, because they'll often time out
otherwise. Whereas on my Android phone, the quite excellent Pocket Casts simply
downloads my podcasts in the background at its leisure with no action on my
part.

Related is the actual terribleness that is notification center, which Apple
added in iOS 5. It was a huge, huge improvement over the previous system, but
it's primitive compared to the notification tray in Android 1.0, let alone the
truly excellent and interactive notifications in 4.2. The worst thing is the
tiny little "x" button that I can never seem to tap—let alone tap twice—to
dismiss a bucket of notifications.

I know this is a personal thing, but many, many touch targets, particularly on
toolbars in the header or footer of the screen, are too small. I frequently fail
to register taps, and in some case gestures. Also, there seems to be a bit of a
lag between when I press the home button and it returns me to Springboard, and
that drives me nuts. I wish Apple enabled the same gestures as on the iPad for
going home and switching tasks. I also find the μk1
on web views to be way too high, but on list views, it's just right. The fact
that I'm nit-picking about these sorts of details is likely and indication that
I've really spent most of my time, historically, on Android, and have developed
a preference for an Android feel, so take this with a grain of salt.

Back to Normal

After spending a few weeks forcing myself to use the iPhone 5 as my primary
device, going back to normal is nice. I've noticed my usage patterns change from
before. I default to Android for most tasks. I do use the iPhone for certain
things, however. Most notably and consistently is the Camera -- the hardware and
software on the iPhone 5 is just plain better, end of story. The second is
Twitter, as Tweetbot is just better than anything available currently available
for Android. The third, strangly enough, is a Google app: YouTube. The screen is
a hair better, the speaker is louder, and is on the side, rather than the back.
And then there's LTE. Most importantly, however, since I use my Nexus 4 for most
things, I tend to go through battery faster on Android, and thus I have more
battery available on the iPhone 5.

I'm glad I did this. It's nice to see how the other half lives. I really get,
for the first time, why power-users like the platform. I actually appreciate
Android more now as well, for what it does very well. Though it's not my
platform of choice, it's an excellent platform, and a fantastic device. I also
can't wait to try iOS 7.

Coefficient of kinetic friction. A higher μk means greater
friction force, which means that the object in motion will slow more
quickly. See this article for more
info (Wikipedia).